I had no idea how many Jewish ideas were found in the Gospel of John until I began working through it with your "Yeshua" book. It brings SO much more richness to the text being able to connect Jesus' words to their context.
Chris Trevino — Edited
John's opening verses are in themselves purely Jewish, e.g. "In the beginning was the Word..". John's use of 'Word' comes from a paraphrase of the Targum Neofiti that refers to the power of God's spoken word the Jews called 'Memra', which means 'Word'. John is telling the Jewish community that "Hey, you know that thing you called 'Memra'? Yeah, this Memra, the Word, his name is actually Jesus. Let me tell you about Jesus..." ...and John's Gospel went from there to do precisely that. (In the Greek NT the translation is 'Logos' that literally means 'word', but in the biblical context it has been used to mean God and loses the actual origin of of the Targum Neofiti where John took this from)